With the advancement of digital technology various forms of information can be recorded, stored and transported on portable storage mediums such as DVDs, memory sticks, jump drives and the like. As this technology has proliferated so has the consumption of digital information. Currently, users with internet access may consume digital media by streaming and/or downloading motion pictures, video clips, music, and even entire seasons of their favorite TV shows to their devices. In other exemplary use cases, such as Big Data applications, users need to have access to significant amounts of data in order to perform the required analysis. In further exemplary use cases, such as confidential health records, it is essential that patient information is available and used by medical professionals without compromising the patient's privacy and health data security. It is often the case that the owners of the said digital media or sensitive data want to be able to control and know who has access to such content.
Traditionally, in the case of online digital media, content owners have been able to control the access to their media or data by first storing the said data on remote servers and then only allowing authorized users to stream the digital media content without allowing the data to ever reside as a file on a clients machine (e.g. Hulu, Pandora, etc.). However, with the proliferation of smart phones and other portable devices such as tablets, and due to the unreliability of wireless internet connectivity, users are increasingly demanding greater storage capacity on devices so that they may store their favorite media locally. In other situations online streaming becomes impractical due in part to bandwidth demands of high-resolution standards such as Blu-Ray and 4 k media. For example, an uncompressed 4K movie can take up to 160 GB of data—even with generous broadband connectivity (i.e. +30 Mbps download speeds) such a download could take hours. This constraint has limited the proliferation of such high resolution content to the slow and antiquated distribution of physical disks such as Blu-Ray disks. Naturally in a world of on-demand media consumption waiting for a disk to be shipped over night is unpalatable. Some retailors such as Redbox have tried to meet the need by shipping movies to local kiosks so that customers may rent them out at their convenience. Other retailers such as Netflix mail disks directly to their customers' homes. Unfortunately such retailors are plagued by inventory and stocking problems due to the unpredictable demand of certain media.
Similarly in “Big Data” use cases it is often impractical for the owners of data to maintain control via a restricted access to a remote server. Often times users need to be able to quickly access the data with very high throughputs and ultra low latency—naturally network connectivity may not always allow for such performance.
Also, in patient health use cases it is sometimes not practical to use traditional storage means while still being compliant with HIPAA privacy protocols. Additionally, while it may be practical to securely host medical data and medical histories online it is not feasible to maintain and retrieve a patient's complete genomic sequence online—by some estimates a patient's complete genomic data—accounting for mutations—can require up to 1 terabyte of space.
Current high capacity storage devices, such as flash drives, offer a limited solution to the described needs because while such devices may be able to store large media files, and may also allow a user to quickly access the data, they unfortunately offer little to no protection in terms of digital rights management (DRM). Media and data on such storage devices are thus susceptible to piracy and unauthorized use because it is difficult to limit such use without using computational resources to enforce a cumbersome encryption/decryption regime.
Such high capacity storage devices present another weakness in that they lack portability. A major selling point of mobile devices is they're compact and have a sleek form factor—they are small with minimal amounts of ports and buttons. Currently, high capacity storage devices tend to be bulky and require cabling for data transfer and external power sources.
Therefore, due to the weakness of current data storage solutions, there is a current and impending need for a device that is portable, capable of high volumes of storage, capable of high-speed data transmission, and is secure. Additionally there is a need for a system that enables such a device to securely and effectively store and transport data.